Agony without end for Liberia's child soldiers

Tomorrow Charles Taylor becomes the first African leader to appear in the dock at The Hague accused of crimes against humanity. In the bullet-scarred region of Lofa, in northern Liberia, Annie Kelly meets his former child soldiers, who were first traumatised by war, then abandoned by the state - and have now been cast out by their own families

Gloria Sherman was 13 years old when Charles Taylor's soldiers came for her in 2001. Flushed from her hiding place in the bush outside her village in Lofa, northern Liberia, she was forced to watch as her father and brother were skinned alive. Then she was taken into a captivity lasting nearly two years: a conscript child soldier and a sexual slave in the former president's army.

She is 18 now, but the memories are still raw. "We used to do bad, bad things that they told us to do," she said last week. "Sometimes even if you were only 10 years old they would put guns and ammunition on your head to carry to the battle; you have to do what they said or they'd kill you. They killed many children, many girls. All the time many soldiers would have sex with you, every night they would come and have sex and beat you, and if you said no they would kill you or hit you with guns."

Tomorrow Taylor will become the first African leader to be tried for crimes against humanity by the Special Court for Sierra Leone, sitting in The Hague. He faces 11 charges - including the deployment of child soldiers - relating to a decade-long civil war in the neighbouring state of Sierra Leone.

But it was in Liberia, as a rebel leader and then as president, that his juvenile bands of killers first began to roam in the 1990s, a military model that was then exported across the border.

Across the towns and villages of the north, countless atrocities took place and thousands of young lives were irredeemably brutalised. Nobody who managed to survive them has forgotten the days when Taylor was the power in the land.

During and after Taylor's successful rebellion against the corrupt and violent government of Samuel Doe, his National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) army controlled much of the country. The Small Boys Unit, made up of children under 11, was among his most feared rebel battalions, a regiment of innocent murderers.

When the rebel warlord was eventually elected president in 1997, one of his election campaign slogans was: "He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him."

The Taylor presidency was savagely violent as constant insurgencies locked the country in a cycle of war until he was forced to resign in 2003. His son, the infamous Chucky Taylor, who ran Taylor's paramilitary anti-terrorism security forces, was jailed by a US court for 97 years this year after it was found that, between 1999 and 2002, his "Demon Forces" squads had tortured to death scores of people accused of being anti-Taylor rebels.

By 2003, as Taylor lost control of large tracts of the country to the equally ruthless Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (Lurd) rebel force, backed by Guinea, some 15,000 children were fighting in Taylor's government forces.

Defeated at last, Taylor resigned, went into exile in Nigeria and now faces life imprisonment if found guilty at The Hague. Meanwhile the children and adolescents who killed and suffered in his name have grown into a traumatised, desolate adulthood.

In Lofa county, where the child soldiers once rampaged, bullet-scarred buildings and burnt-out checkpoints still stand as monuments to the relentless fighting this province endured.

Rebel activity and government raids forced hundreds of thousands of civilians in Lofa to flee their homes and surge over the borders of Guinea and Sierra Leone, where they filled sprawling refugee camps until the peace in 2003. When they came back, they found Lofa in tatters, its infrastructure destroyed and villages burnt. Although the region is now peaceful and the land is once again lush, the scars of the war are everywhere.

Many villages in the region are little more than temporary shelters dotted with shattered buildings and burnt-out churches. Rows of tanks sit behind barbed wire as bored Bangladeshi peacekeeping soldiers sit fingering their rifles at lookout posts in United Nations encampments scattered throughout the area.

The vast majority of people here have no electricity and struggle to scrape a living from the land. As for the thousands of former child combatants who returned here after the war, they are now obliged to endure new horrors as they try to rebuild their lives.

Two years of systematic rape and beatings have left Gloria with jagged scars and internal injuries so severe that she has little chance of ever becoming a mother. When she managed to escape from her captors and make her way back to her village, she found that she was now an outcast.

Labelled a "rebel wife" and accused of collaborating in the violence inflicted on her village by drugged and ruthless soldiers during the war, she says that the only way she can survive is by having sex with men - NGO workers, government officials and businessmen - who often pay her in food, sanitary towels or soap.

"They say we are bad girls because of what we did in the war and what we do now," Gloria said. "But they took me and I had no choice."

The Observer talked to dozens of Taylor's former child soldiers in Lofa who said that they have been abandoned by the state, ostracised by their families and forced into prostitution and crime in order to survive.

Elijah Kollie, a frail 19-year-old taken from his home by Taylor's government troops in 2000, talked impassively of children's stomachs being slit open in front of him and of the multiple rapes and murders he witnessed on the front line. "When I came back, I didn't have anyone: everyone in my family was dead," he said with a shrug.

He points to a patch of earth in the centre of the village where he said that Lurd rebels used to boil alive people they suspected of aiding Taylor's government forces. "I still don't know where to go because I can't forget what happened. I feel angry because of what happened to me and now people here are causing many problems for us. I just wish my father was still here."

A recent report by Plan, a leading international children's organisation, said that the phenomenon of child soldier armies in conflicts across west Africa has left a devastating footprint of psychological trauma and spiralling suicide rates across the region.

Interviews conducted with child soldiers across Liberia for the report revealed that 60% of them had witnessed another child being beaten to death, 87% had seen a family member killed and 84% had found themselves "surrounded by, lying underneath or stepping on" dead bodies.

In Sierra Leone, Plan researchers deemed 70% of girls and 80% of boys interviewed for the report were at serious risk of suicide, with 30% of children interviewed having already attempted suicide on at least one occasion.

"The war broke the bonds between children and their parents and extended families. Those who fought as soldiers are now treated as pariahs and this stigma goes all the way up the chain from village level up to local and central government," said Joseph Henah, a counsellor at one of Plan's child soldier support programmes in Lofa.

"The situation that is faced by many of these children is desperate. The majority, if not all, of the girls are forced into transactional sex. Many are living alone, they are on drugs, they cannot go to school and this is the generation which is supposed to be leading our country out of poverty and into a better future."

Child rights groups say that the plight of Liberia's former child soldiers is going unheeded as the government struggles to provide even basic services to its 3.5 million people, 2.4 million of whom are surviving on less than $1 a day. As one of the world's poorest countries - with only 50 government doctors and the eighth highest global maternal mortality rate - Liberia has no money to spend on the casualties of its shocking recent history.

When asked about why the government is failing to help former child soldiers, Dr Wilhemina Jallah of the John F Kennedy Memorial Hospital in the capital, Monrovia, points to the hundreds of women waiting for treatment in the hospital's steamy outpatient clinic. "The majority of women who come in to give birth have malaria, many have terrible injuries which makes childbirth dangerous, there is no transport to health centres in rural areas and we don't have enough drugs," she said. "Although they are needed, mental health services are not our priority."

Many fear the country's fragile peace now hangs in the balance after Liberia's Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its final report last week, recommending that the current president, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, and other key political figures face sanctions for their role in the civil war.

The report recommended that the popular Johnson-Sirleaf be banned from holding public office for 30 years for her role in financing Taylor's invasion in 1989. Testifying before the commission earlier this year, Johnson-Sirleaf apologised for her support of Taylor, saying that she had been "fooled" into it.

"If there is anything that I need to apologise for to this nation, it is to apologise for being fooled by Mr Taylor in giving any kind of support to him," the president told the commission. "I feel it in my conscience. I feel it every day."

The commission, which was launched by Johnson-Sirleaf herself after she was elected in 2005, heard testimonies from thousands of victims in an effort to move the country towards reconciliation before launching its final report. Several of the former warlords who are recommended for prosecution by the commission, many of whom now hold public office, have already pledged to oppose any attempt to bring them to justice, sparking fears of a return to violence.

In Monrovia, many Liberians say their desire for peace outweighs their need for justice. "We just want to forget the war and move on; we don't want a return to violence: we want peace and jobs," said Charles Muyan, who drives a taxi downtown. "We don't want this whole thing brought up again."

But in Lofa, hundreds of miles away, there is no indication that life will get any better for the thousands of former child soldiers struggling to survive. "I think about my father and my brother every day and my sister who I haven't seen since she was taken by rebels," said Gloria. "When I close my eyes, all I can see is the war. I often think about taking my own life. It would have been better if I'd died in the war, but I am still alive and I hope one day something will be different and I will be a good person."

The burden of being a "rebel child" has proved too much for some. Two months ago, Mardy Samuka's body was found swinging from the roof of the bullet-scarred church near the village of Foya in Lofa - another, belated victim of Taylor's terrifying reign.

Samuka's aunt, Moidee, wept as she talked of the desperation her nephew felt. Crippled when a stray bullet lodged in his leg during fighting around the village in 2001, it was what happened to him after the war that drove the 19-year-old to put the noose around his neck, she said.

"I tell people that he was never a soldier, that he never did any of those terrible things that the children did to this village, but any child missing a limb is known as a former soldier here," she said.

"He carried that stigma, we all did; his life could come to nothing. There was nobody to help him."

• Some of the names in this article have been changed to protect identities

Life and times of Charles Taylor

1948 Born Charles McArthur Ghankay Taylor to a Gola mother and American-Liberian father in Arthington, Liberia.

1972 Awarded degree at Bentley college, Massachusetts.

1980 Supports coup led by Samuel K Doe and given high-ranking position in Liberian government.

1983 Faces charges of embezzling $922,000 and flees Liberia.

1984 Arrested on the run in Massachusetts and jailed.

1985 Rumoured to have sawed through prison bars to escape a US jail before leaving for Libya.